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Pakistan Sees Shared Intelligence Lapse

PARIS — As Pakistan faced a growing chorus of questions about its avowed ignorance of Osama bin Laden’s presence on its soil, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani sought to shift the focus of blame on Wednesday, saying the intelligence failure was made by “the whole world, not Pakistan alone.”

The maneuvering came three days after President Obama announced that Bin Laden had been killed in an American commando raid on a compound in Abbottabad, just 35 miles from the Pakistani capital — an event that prompted Western leaders, including senior officials in France and Britain, to say Pakistan had to explain why it said it had not been aware of the presence of the leader of Al Qaeda.

Shortly before he met with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, on Wednesday during a long-scheduled visit here, Mr. Gilani was asked the same question by reporters and said, “There is an intelligence failure of the whole world, not just Pakistan alone.”

He said Pakistan shared intelligence “with the rest of the world, including the United States,” so if there were what he called lapses in Pakistan “that means lapses from the whole world.”

After the meeting, Mr. Gilani that he did not believe the United States Congress would show its displeasure with Pakistan by cutting aid to his nuclear-armed nation and he said the West would continue to support Pakistan as a “responsible nation.”

Mr. Gilani’s trip to France is supposed to encourage French investment in his country, despite the momentous events that culminated in Bin Laden’s killing.

“Today, through your forum, I want to convince the world that instead of giving negative messages for Pakistan, rather we should send positive messages to Pakistan,” Mr. Gilani told a French employers’ group, according to Reuters. “We should have positive messages because no one, no single nation, alone can fight terrorism. Pakistan is a part of the solution and not a part of the problem.”

In recent days both the British prime minister, David Cameron, and the French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, have raised questions about how Bin Laden could have lived undetected so close to the Pakistani capital while he was the most wanted man in the United States — supposedly Pakistan’s ally in combating terrorism.

But both European leaders concluded that, as Mr. Juppé put it, Pakistan is such an important player in the region, specifically in determining the outcome of the war in Afghanistan, that “we have every interest in keeping good relations with it.”

“There will be no solution in Afghanistan, no long-lasting political solution, if we do not manage to work in trust with Pakistan,” Mr. Juppé said.

As Mr. Gilani visited Paris, another senior Pakistani official, Salman Bashir, told the BBC that “Pakistan has played a pivotal role” in the hunt for Bin Laden and that it had even drawn the attention of American intelligence agencies in 2009 to suspicions about the compound where Bin Laden was killed.

But he stopped shorting of saying Pakistan’s own intelligence agents had known Bin Laden was living there, arguing that it took the superior resources of the Central Intelligence Agency to make that discovery.

In a statement on Tuesday, the Pakistani Foreign Ministry said the “intelligence flow indicating some foreigners in the surroundings of Abbottabad, continued till mid-April 2011.”

“It is important to highlight that taking advantage of much superior technological assets, the C.I.A. exploited the intelligence leads given by us to identify and reach Osama bin Laden,” the statement said.

Pakistani officials have been angered by a widely reported assertion by the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, that Washington did not share advance knowledge of the raid with Pakistan because it might have leaked, allowing Bin Laden to escape.